An entertaining concoction with plenty of twists on the way to a nicely unexpected resolution.
Science fiction, the paranormal, cults, and oddball characters collide in this amiable thriller.
Something very bad has happened to young Wesley Keener. He’s cracked his skull open—just how is a matter requiring some fact-finding—and now he’s empty of everything but a bright light, something like the trunk of the car at the center of Alex Cox’s film Repo Man. “Hollow….They hollowed him out.” So thinks Jay Albert Shenk, a Los Angeles ambulance-chaser attorney who sports a tiny ponytail and a generally good-natured attitude, turning competitive only when he’s up against lesser lawyers. He’s a fine and mostly honest fellow in whom Winters, an expert practitioner of odd scenarios in books such as Underground Airlines (2016), invests much attention and character development. In company with his adopted son, Ruben, a grocery-store clerk—born in Vietnam, raised Jewish, and nicknamed “Rabbi”—Shenk tries to ferret out what it was, exactly, that happened to poor Wesley while filing a medical malpractice against the doctors—the “they” in question—who treated him once he was rushed to the hospital. “Shenk had been doing this for nineteen years…and he could give you the lowdown on every sawbones, on every hospital and clinic and urgent care in Southern California,” Winters writes. The doctors range from weary to evasive to self-appointed deity, but they’re the least of Shenk’s problems: Both he and Ruben are visited by spectral cultists who think Wesley’s shell might just harbor a portal to another world. Wesley’s dad is a handful, the expert witness Shenk hires turns out to be a slippery character, and Wesley’s sister, Evie, “not a rock star, not exactly, but she was a certified indie darling, her star ascendant,” has plenty of complicating secrets of her own. Winters’ lively tale jumps from decade to decade and all over the map as everyone grows older except Wesley, with a growing trail of bodies and suspects to mark the story’s passage.
An entertaining concoction with plenty of twists on the way to a nicely unexpected resolution.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-50544-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
